


show me your skies

by radialarch



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, M/M, Telepathy, crooked are rebellion fighters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-12 10:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18444248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...(Jon Favreau wins a battle, with some help.)





	show me your skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nobirdstofly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nobirdstofly/gifts).



> i loved all of your prompts, though not sure how closely this tracks. hope you enjoy!
> 
> vaguely star wars-inspired, but not a fusion. genre-typical implied or threatened violence. some consent issues elaborated in the endnotes.

“There’s something chasing us,” Jon said.

“Could be a coincidence.” Tommy didn’t like to be imprecise. He spent half his days with the nav panels, and knew their limitations better than anyone. “Whatever it is, hasn’t made a move on us yet. Unidentified. If it’s an Imperial vessel, it’s being cautious. No pings.”

“Cautious is just another word for waiting for backup,” said Lovett. “Look, we’re sitting ducks out here. We’re _not_ gonna rendezvous with Dan with this thing up our ass, so what are we even doing? Get down to a port, do some fancy loops, lose whatever escort we picked up. It’s not complicated.”

“The acrobatics might actually attract Imperial attention,” Tommy said acidly. “Unnecessary risk.”

“Right, because it’s not like my lifestyle as a rebellion fighter wasn’t risky enough—”

“Lovett,” Jon said, and Lovett whipped a betrayed look at him. “We’re all on edge, but let’s not lose our heads. Tom, you said you don’t know what this thing looks like.”

“It doesn’t look like a ship.” Tommy tapped a deep radio scan. “Not enough structural integrity, see? Kind of granular. But if they’re using an absorption shield—”

“Which _would_ make this an Imperial ship—”

“That tech’s only been verified for the Emperor’s personal guard, so feel free to let us know if you’re seeing a gold-plated monstrosity somewhere we’ve missed—”

“ _Stop it_ ,” Jon hissed, and now both Tommy and Lovett were looking furiously at him. “We’ve been up here too long, it’s getting to our heads. I don’t know if we’re being tailed or not, but we gotta get our feet on solid ground. Where’s the nearest safe port?”

“Delta-47,” Lovett said after a moment. “Not a port so much as land that nobody’s bothered taking.”

“Good enough for me,” said Jon. “Get us there, will you?”

———

They called it space sickness, but Jon thought of it more as homesickness. Leave a person breathing recycled air for too long, swap gravity for bursts of shipboard acceleration, and it did something funny to the brain. When they did studies on rats — a generation before space travel had become ubiquitous — some of the rats had turned vicious, attacking their handlers, other rats, anything they could vent their fury on. But others had just stopped eating. They’d curled up in their pods, their noses pointed planetward, and died.

Jon didn’t like to imagine which one he might be.

There was a rudimentary port on Delta-47, the kind that didn’t care about your papers as much as the credits underneath them. Jon gritted his teeth, handing over a sizeable chunk of the ship’s emergency fund, and found himself under a beating sun for the first time in — it must have been months, at least. Shomik and Alex had gotten married, and Alex needed a bit of earth for the glass. Strange, the traditions you carried with you. The Empire wrought its destruction, but people managed to snatch lives out of the scraps it left behind. A white veil; crushed glass underfoot. Those were the memories you held onto when you felt yourself turning into a rat.

“You know what I want,” Lovett said dreamily, one hand up to shield his eyes from the sunlight fracturing off the sea. The beach by the hangars was deserted, just the three of them in sight. “Steak. A big, juicy steak, with mashed potatoes and green beans, and a fucking— Coke. That’s what I want right now.”

“Have you _ever_ had a steak?” Tommy asked curiously. “Didn’t cows go extinct in like, ‘72? That’s before we were born.”

“You can read about it, Tommy.” Lovett kicked his feet, wriggling his toes while the sand poured between them. “Also, I hear they never went extinct. There’s like, one last herd of cows in Elsion, and every two years they kill one and sell chips of meat for a million credits each.”

“I don’t care how good the microfilms say it is, nothing’s worth a million credits.” Tommy yawned; a damp golden curl of hair flopped onto his forehead. “Imagine what we could do with a million credits.”

“I wanted the steak,” said Lovett. “Fine, what would you do with a million credits? Something frivolous. Nothing boring like ‘fix the ship and fund the rebellion.’”

“We _should_ fix the ship and fund the rebellion,” Tommy said, momentarily stern, and then shrugged, lying back on the towel. “I did have a sip of this whiskey once. Smooth as hell. I felt warm for half a day. That was nice.”

“And you thought _steak_ was decadent.”

“But I mean, spending it on food kinda feels like a waste.” Tommy had his arms folded beneath his head, and his low lazy drawl was coming out. It’d been a while since Jon had heard that. Days like this were too rare, Jon thought: too many days being chased or chasing ghosts, and not enough of letting the sun soak deep into their skin. There was pink creeping up Tommy’s forehead. Stay out long enough, and he might even burn.

“My dad,” Tommy kept on, “he grew up with a dog. Loved that thing, but they couldn’t take her when the whole star system got commandeered. Strategic position, you know.”

“Huh,” Jon said. “Did you ever—?” Dogs were hard to find, these days. In all the black markets Jon had passed through, he’d never seen one.

“Naw, don’t remember. Got a picture, though. My parents, Bear, and me. I look awful,” he added with a sudden laugh. “All red and screaming. Her head’s like the size of my whole body.” 

Lovett let out a soft snort. “Think that’s cheating, technically. No way you can get a dog anywhere in the galaxy for a paltry million. But fine, we’ll let you have that. Jon, what about you?”

Jon tipped his head up to the sky, staring idly at a high off cloud. What did he want? He had a sneaking suspicion it looked a lot like this: Lovett, reaching out to poke at Jon’s calf with a toe, and Tommy on the other side of him, sun-flushed and grinning. He wanted to win the war and stop living a life so untethered he never even set foot on land eleven months of the year.

He wanted, he supposed, to go home, if only he could find it.

“Dunno know,” he said out loud, instead of any of that. “Maybe I’ll go in with Tommy on the dog.”

“Motherfucker,” Lovett said with feigned contempt, “could’ve offered to get me a bigger steak, but no,” and that set Lovett and Tommy comfortably bickering about the merits of eating a two million credit dog. Jon nearly fell to drowsing, their voices in his ear and their shadows lengthening around him bit by bit, and when all his nerves suddenly pulled tripwire tight he couldn’t understand what had alarmed him, at first.

A slow breeze had kicked up through the heat, and Jon had been idly tracking the clouds as they traveled in a great, slow swath along the horizon. But in the middle of them — he could see it more clearly now — there was a disturbance, a countercurrent.

Something was moving against the wind, coming right at them.

“Tommy,” Jon said, bolting upright. “Do you see that?”

It took Tommy a moment to catch sight of it, and then he frowned. “What the hell is that?” His eyesight was the best out of all three of them, but he was squinting, trying vainly to make out something that didn’t seem to be quite solid. “Can’t be a ship, the movements aren’t right, it’s all chaotic. Weird. Is it even— alive, or something inorganic, I don’t—”

Lovett had come up to Jon’s side to look, too. “I’ve seen this before,” he said slowly; his face was perplexed. “I know I have.”

“God, I wish it’d stop moving for a second— it’s vibrating or something, I can’t quite—”

“ _Oh_ ,” Lovett said, triumphant. “Bees!”

“Bees,” Jon said blankly. “Like the ones that dance?” His biology curriculum hadn’t focused much on old Earth organisms, but he’d had a toy once, black and yellow with legs that wriggled when he squeezed. God, what had happened to that?

“Of course neither of you bozos had a single class in archaeobiology— look, I don’t know. It's what reminded me: a swarm. Swarms move like that.”

“Or ships,” Tommy said, and he didn’t sound uncertain now, just grim. The moment had wiped the afternoon softness from his face. “Ships in formation. A lot of them.”

But it wasn’t ships, Jon could tell that much. Too small, and too quick; he almost thought Lovett was right, except bees had been extinct for centuries, and they couldn’t be here anyway, light-years away from old Earth. So what did that say? Something that moved in a swarm — something that was closing in every second Jon waited—

There was a buzzing in his head. “We should get back to the ship,” Jon said, while the vibrations rolled through his teeth and swallowed up his words.

“Yeah,” Tommy said, “go,” nodding at Lovett, and his fingers wrapped around Jon’s upper arm. “Jon,” he said, ducking his head to peer into Jon’s face. “Come on.”

Tommy’s voice was steady, and so was his grip. It made it easier for Jon to think, too, cutting through the fuzziness of his thoughts. “Think this thing wants me,” he gritted out, while Tommy started pulling him toward the hangars. Whatever it was, it had to be a telepathic species, but there’d never been enough of them for much research. “It’s strong. Determined.” 

“Yeah, too bad,” Tommy said, low, and Jon could see the faint gleam of his teeth. “So’m I. Tell it it can’t have you.”

Lovett had maneuvered the _Endeavor_ out of its bay, hovering in position for rapid takeoff. Jon thought, briefly and nonsensically, about the extra fees that would cost, but then his feet hit the gangway and his knees folded under him without warning.

“Jon,” Tommy was saying, wrestling him onto the ship, but Jon couldn’t answer. There was a slow burning pain starting where Jon’s head met his spine, flaring hotter and hotter; Lovett seemed a galaxy away, yelling, “Tell me he’s not dead,” above the roar of the engines, while something small and desperate whispered in Jon’s head, _help us help us help us—_

And suddenly, calm and clear: _a gift for a gift_.

———

Jon’s head was aching. When he tried to get up, the pain spiked, throbbing at the base of his skull.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Lovett, coming into view, and pressed a small clear capsule into Jon’s hand before retreating. “Stay down and take your medicine.”

The rebuke was tempered by the relief Jon could feel radiating off Lovett. Jon obediently popped the capsule into his mouth, which dissolved with an easy cool sweetness. Some kind of painkiller, beginning to dull the edges of his headache. Lovett must have been worried — they tried to ration meds when possible.

He probably should’ve given the capsule a moment to work. What he did instead was maneuver himself up, sliding his legs off the cot. “What’s the situation,” he said, the words rasping through his throat, and then had to pause. “Where’s Tommy?”

Lovett shot an exasperated look across the room. “ _Tommy’s_ fine,” he said. “I made him go look at maps so he’d stop bothering me. _You_ should be asleep so you don’t undo all my hard work.” He picked up a water pouch from his inventory and tossed it at Jon. “You know you’ve been out for two days?”

“Two days!” Jon shot to his feet at that, which made a wave of nausea roll through him. He sat back down, winded, and tried to think. “The rendezvous — what about Dan? He won’t know—”

“I _have_ a medical degree,” Lovett muttered. He set down a roll of gauze and came over to the cot. “Years of my life, learning about the intricacies of the human body. But do any of you idiots listen to me? What did I want this job for?” He was quickly, deftly checking Jon over, fingers pressed to the underside of his jaw, turning his wrist over for a pulse. “Should’ve listened to my mom. They don’t talk back in neonatal.”

“You would’ve hated it,” Jon said, cracking a woozy grin at him. Lovett liked when they gave him a fight, sometimes went looking for one on the quiet days. Of course he did — the rebellion didn't take conscripts. Lovett had volunteered for a war, same as the rest of them.

Tommy had gotten in touch with Dan. That would have to be enough. “So what the hell happened,” Jon said, biting down on the top of his water. Lovett had given him one of the good ones; the fizz rolled over his tongue, carrying a faint citrus flavor. “I wasn’t— I mean, I feel okay—”

“One,” Lovett said, turning around with a raised finger, “don’t be ridiculous, you can’t stand on your feet for more than a second, and two, I don’t— Tommy, I swear to god, if you set him off—”

“Sorry!” Tommy had nearly collided with Lovett, striding through the bay doors. “He’s, um, he’s awake?”

“This isn’t a zoo,” Lovett groused, but Tommy was already circling around him.

“Hi,” Tommy told Jon, “glad to see you haven’t taken off on us,” and his eyes were crinkled at the corners, the curve of his mouth soft. Jon had racked up his fair share of stays in sickbay over the ten years they’ve known each other, and still Tommy fretted like every time was the first.

“Couldn’t do that,” Jon said. “How would you two deal without me?”

“No one’s irreplaceable, Favreau,” Lovett declared, but his heart wasn’t in it. “All right, Tommy, you’ve seen him, so if you’re done riling up my patient—”

“Yeah, I know, I promised to be a good boy,” Tommy said, slow and sardonic. “Come on, Lovett, you can’t keep him cooped up in here forever. And Alyssa said—”

“Alyssa’s not on this ship,” Lovett snapped. “Xenobiotic contact is fucking unpredictable, we still don’t know what those things did to Jon, and now you wanna—”

“Lovett,” Jon said in his most reasonable voice. “I’m _fine_.”

“Oh, really.” Lovett whipped around, eyes wild. “You were unresponsive for 48 hours, your brain waves were completely scrambled, and those— _things_ , they didn’t just vanish, they left something _in you_ —” His hand brushed the back of Jon’s neck, and as Lovett spit out his words Jon’s headache flared up again beneath Lovett’s touch, tinged with terror—

Lovett had been afraid. Lovett had thought — Jon felt it, the moment Tommy had dragged Jon onto the ship — that Jon would be dead and Lovett wouldn’t be able to do a single thing to change that.

“But I’m not,” Jon said, ragged. “Lovett, I’m right here.”

———

“Okay,” Tommy said. “So. Uh. Not a lot of info on acquired telepathy.”

“Ah,” said Jon. His head still hurt, and he was entirely too aware of his body, every inch of exposed skin. “Lucky me.”

“This is bad,” Lovett said. “ _So_ bad. People literally don’t have the neural structure to support— have you ever dissected a Tritian brain? They’ve got an entire other lobe to deal with this stuff, and they still had to give up on eyes entirely!”

“Well, I can see perfectly fine,” Jon said, vaguely offended. “Stop calling my brain small.” He looked up, meaning to shoot Tommy a grin, but it faded from his face when he saw Tommy’s expression.

“Lovett’s not wrong.” Tommy was being very careful. Jon hated when Tommy did that to him. “Look, if it were feasible — there _was_ Imperial research, as far as I can tell, and the outcomes weren’t— well. Obviously the Emperor would love telepaths for his personal guard, and they’re not.”

“Will you stop talking about it like I’m about to keel over any second!” Jon had only been awake for some hours, but already he was sick to the teeth of Lovett shooting stricken glances at him, of Tommy’s ashen face. He’d been through worse before — they all had, and Jon didn’t believe in giving up before they’d started.

The headache had settled into the grooves of Jon’s awareness. He could survive that. Somehow, they were gonna find a way to fix this, and all Jon had to do was hold on until then.

Maybe Jon couldn’t solve this problem by himself. But he wasn’t alone. He had Tommy and Lovett, and they’d never let him down before.

———

The first thing Dan said when Jon called was, “You have to come in.”

“I can’t,” Jon said. Lovett made a skeptical sound somewhere behind him, and Jon waved it off. He’d been thinking about this.

“Are you serious?” Dan was, predictably, incredulous. “You’re compromised. You’re so compromised you’re the _definition_ of compromised, you can’t stay out there in a ship the size of a golf ball.”

“The _Endeavor_ is at least the size of a drift ball,” Jon said. Dan didn’t look impressed, but Jon hadn’t expected him to. “And I’m not _compromised_. You can use me.”

“Wait,” Tommy started, “hang on,” but Dan got there first. Jon had counted on that.

“Lovett said you were sick.” Their comm screen wasn't the best resolution, but Jon could almost see the way Dan would frown, weigh the pros and cons and run the same calculation Jon had. That was what Dan did best; that was how Dan had survived, all these years. “What if you don’t pull through?”

“Look, the assassination failed.” Who had Jon gotten that from, Tommy or Lovett? It shouldn’t have mattered, but Lovett would take it personally. “Our last big fight was a decade ago. You don’t have a lot of other options.” 

That’s what the rebellion was: a motley crew borrowing time until— until what? Jon had run out his clock. Something had to come next.

“No,” Lovett was saying, furious, “I don’t know if it’s the massive head injury speaking, but you’re doing this over my dead fucking body,” and Tommy only said, “Jon,” low and pleading; but for the first time in Jon’s life he could see the future, the end of the war, delicate but real. He’d been given something. He could at least make this happen.

“One chance,” he said, grinned wild and reckless. “Let me do this, Dan, and I’ll get you a free and fair election.”

———

The trick was not to give Tommy and Lovett time to think. The plan that had sprung to Jon’s mind was only half-formed, but he understood enough of it to know that they had to act now. In six weeks, it would be the anniversary of the July uprising; in six weeks, the Imperial fleet would land on Alpha-6, armed and armored, and they’d carry out the same sham of a ritual they’d been performing for a generation. 

They’d prodded Jon to the polls twice, before he stowed away off-planet. Twice, they’d made Jon put his mark to paper with a blaster jammed in the small of his back, made Jon part of an election the Emperor could never lose.

“Comes back to hubris,” Jon said, and there was something like satisfaction burning in his belly, a counterpoint to the throbbing in his skull. “The entire Imperial fleet grounded for a fucking joke? He could rig the whole thing with half a dozen squadrons in the right place, but he always has to come back to gloat.”

“People have tried to take out the fleet before,” Tommy pointed out. “They know they’re a target, security’s always thick as hell.” But the bridge of his nose was crinkled, his expression thoughtful. He wanted to be convinced.

Lovett wasn’t so receptive. “If you want to do any real damage you’d need the security codes,” he said flatly. “Not just one, all of them. So you’d need to get to the security chief, which means Imperial Guard, which means you’d get sliced to pieces before you took two steps because they're— why are we even entertaining this dumb idea? We shouldn’t be talking, Tommy, we should be taking away his captain’s hat and sitting on him until he comes to his fucking senses!”

“I don’t have a hat,” Jon said, as mildly as he could. “The hats were never practical, anyway. I can get the codes, Lovett. Dan thinks this could work.”

“Dan doesn’t know shit about contact telepathy.” Lovett wasn’t budging. “Tell me you can lift the codes out of some guy’s mind, then. Tell me it’ll take half a second, and then you’ll be done with the whole thing. Go on. Lie to my face.”

That wasn’t playing fair, and Lovett knew it. He was staring at Jon grimly, jaw set, and in the end it was Jon who looked away first.

“You didn’t say any of this to Dan,” said Tommy. 

“I should have.” Lovett’s fingers were drumming on the console; it took Jon a moment to realize the anger in Lovett’s voice wasn’t entirely at him. “Don’t know why I didn’t.”

And that was a lie, too. Lovett could never stop himself from doing what he thought was right, even when he hated himself for it. And that was what Lovett was waiting for, Jon realized. Tommy wanted to hear that the plan was possible; Lovett wanted to know if it would matter. That it would matter.

“You know I’ve been wondering,” Jon started, trying to gather the right words. Here was a thought that’d been niggling at him since this all started, falling into place. “Why me, right? Back at Delta-47, it could’ve been any of us. Guess I just chalked it up to bad luck.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lovett. “If it was _bad_ luck, you’d be dead.”

“The— things, whatever they were—” Jon remembered, could _taste_ the echo of their desperation on his tongue, terror and grief and, far underneath it all, the faintest flicker of hope. “They got driven off their planet. They knew they weren’t gonna make it back.”

“So what?” Gruff, flippant. People didn’t know it, but that was Lovett at his most dangerous. “Gonna tell me this is all a big setup for _Revenge of the Bees_?”

“Not just the bees,” said Jon. “When’s the last time you went home, Lovett?”

Lovett flinched. Behind him, Tommy offered up, with a grim sort of humor, “Yeah, it’s been a while.” 

Jon hadn’t been to Alpha-6 in twenty years. The day he left, eighteen and stupid, seething with a deep sense of injustice, he hadn’t given a thought to how he might come back.

Those rats, again. People really weren’t as evolved as they pretended to be.

“So help me,” Jon said, the plea dragged out from somewhere deep inside him. “C’mon. Make this the one that counts.”

———

Between mapping out the airfield on Alpha-6 and memorizing half a dozen schedules down to the minute, it ended up that Jon did most of his practicing with Tommy.

Not that it should have mattered. Mindreading took work, Jon could’ve told Lovett after the first hour. It wasn’t like he was plucking Tommy’s greatest secrets out of his head. In fact, it took a couple of weeks for Jon to start getting reliable information about anything.

Mostly, they played cards.

Tommy was winning.

“Don't have to read your mind if I can just read your face,” Tommy said for the tenth time, grinning. “What d’you think?”

Jon took his fingers off Tommy's forearm, flipped his cards over. “A better hand than me,” he said, rueful. “Was that a pair of eights?”

“Yes,” said Tommy, pleased, and claimed the last of Jon's flavor packets from the pot. “Color?”

“Yellow,” Jon said, “and before that, you were thinking about the notice that went over public comms last night—”

“What did it say?” Tommy asked crisply. “I know you haven't gone over those logs yet.”

Jon hesitated. “Not sure,” he confessed, and reached for Tommy’s arm again. “Keep it in the back of your mind, don’t think that hard about it, all right?”

Jon was beginning to get used to this: a thousand threads of ideas assaulting his senses. Was it better if he closed his eyes? Last night’s logs had a particular sound, the clean smell of the navdeck. He pushed past the way his headache flared up, sharp and insistent. Reached for the crackle of public comms; the brief ionic flicker of the screen when you logged a new entry. Tommy had been surprised to hear the notice. This far out, the Empire didn’t usually bother broadcasting propaganda. The notice had said— it had said—

_Lovett?_

Jon came back to himself with a shudder, and when he opened his eyes again Lovett was standing behind Tommy, staring hard at Jon. “The forty year anniversary,” Jon gasped. It felt like his mouth was full of cotton. “Closing all of alpha-sector airspace soon. Imperial ships only. We gotta get down there, Tommy, we gotta—”

And Lovett had been there, too, head bent over the comms, saying something to Tommy in a low worried tone—

“One hand,” Lovett said, and took the deck from Tommy. Tommy relinquished it gracefully, stood to offer Lovett the seat. “You win, and we’ll go.” The cards riffled over each other, a clean _swish swish_ , but Lovett never took his eyes away from Jon until he’d slid over five cards. “Get this right, Favreau. Show me what you can do.”

Lovett had his cards fanned out in front of him, a minute tremor in his hand. Jon wondered which outcome Lovett would be happiest with. Quite possibly he didn’t know himself. Hell, for all his bravado, _Jon_ wasn’t sure what the right move was. It just happened that he was out of choices.

Jon stretched out, deliberate, brushed the back of his fingers over Lovett’s knuckles, and Lovett’s thoughts slammed into him, warp speed.

Lovett’s mind was harder, sharper than Tommy’s, thoughts flying furiously. Jon had expected that. More surprising was the way those thoughts came back to him and Tommy, shot through with exasperated fondness. Lovett worried, and sniped, and argued with all he had, but at the end of the day there was never a question he would follow them anywhere. The Imperial palace; the end of the world.

And, even with memories two decades gone, Jon could show them Alpha-6. It had been beautiful. It was beautiful.

“An ace and a star,” Jon croaked, and flipped over his cards. Three sevens gleamed up from the table. “I win.”

Lovett didn’t move. It was Tommy who took his cards and set them down, unseen. “You win,” he agreed. “We go.”

———

Tanya had forged them new credentials, but the best way to survive was not to test them at all. They entered alpha-space drafting a comet, spent the next two weeks dodging cruisers and gravity jumping. It was nearly impossible to make contact with Dan’s crew this deep in Imperial territory, and they didn’t try. Just the three of them and a beat-up ship. Jon didn’t need anyone else.

The plan depended on a lot. Whether Tommy could approximate a dizzying number of interactions to calculate the deadweight trajectory of an entire fleet. Whether Lovett could access a ship’s central nav system with the same surgical precision he employed on a spinal cord. Whether the Imperial fleet would keep guard the same way Jon always remembered: crisscrossing the skies, unhurried, indolent. As a child, the shadows crawling lazily along the ground had terrified him even when he didn’t know why. 

The Empire had unimaginable power. The Empire believed in it absolutely.

And Jon was going to stop it—Jon, with the old terror still in his teeth, with a power he didn’t even fully understand.

“Good day to test these heat shields,” Tommy remarked as they packed the last of their things. “Lovett, you sure this thing flies?”

They’d never take the _Endeavor_ down to surface unnoticed. Instead, Lovett had spent days retrofitting the escape pod into something resembling a functional craft. The exact degree of resemblance depended on who you asked. Tommy, it happened, was a skeptic.

“How dare you,” Lovett said, tapping a knuckle on the port window, and winced when the pod groaned ominously. “This thing is going to save all our asses, so why don’t you sit down and shut up.”

“Figuratively,” Tommy clarified. “Because there are no seats.”

Jon laughed, suddenly. “God, this is crazy.”

“You change your mind?” said Lovett, one eyebrow raised. “This was all your idea, as I recall.”

“No,” Jon said, “I was just thinking— I couldn’t do this without you two, you know?” And maybe it wasn’t laughter still at the back of his throat, but affection, so deep it almost hurt. Lovett and Tommy had been the first crew Jon could call his own, picked for the _Endeavor_ ’s maiden flight. The choice hadn’t been hard. 

Lovett and Tommy shared a look, something soft that was achingly familiar. “We know,” Tommy said. “You’d be useless without us.”

“And even now, sometimes that’s still true,” said Lovett with a grin. “So let’s get going, shall we?”

———

The Chief Imperial Guard was a small, pale man with delicate features. Looking at him, it seemed faintly ridiculous that he could have caused the suffering of billions. But it was his face on every new security announcement, his initials stamped ostentatiously on the death warrant of every captured rebel. Perhaps it was wrong to even think of him as a man, rather than an arm of the Empire. He acted as an extension of the Emperor's power; he was only a conduit, through which the Emperor controlled the sky, and that meant everything. 

Tommy was where he needed to be, which was back in the pod, and Lovett was somewhere on the vast airfield grounds. That left Jon here, in the bustling marketplace, watching Imperial guards stomp through the crowd. People melted out of the way when they could, eager to avoid attention. Easier to achieve that now, a week out from the election. The guards weren't as forgiving when the Emperor's temper was on the line.

Fact: Jon needed contact with someone to read a mind.

Fact: the Chief Guard liked men.

Tommy and Lovett could have guessed this part, but Jon hadn't told them. It seemed cleaner that way.

Jon took a breath, then flung himself into the crowd. It was almost like dodging debris in an asteroid system, except his intent was the opposite. He wove in front of a child, casually stepped behind a woman who was moving too slowly to avoid collision, and stumbled onto the ground right in front of the guards.

There was a heavy beat of silence. Jon gave himself three seconds before he looked up.

“Move,” a voice said. A boot slammed into Jon's ribs, knocking air from his lungs. “The Empire warns once.”

That had been the Imperial Guard's warning when faced with the July uprising, Jon had learned once. The ion cannons had opened up a split second later.

Jon didn't have to feign the wince when he staggered up. There was dust in his throat. “Please,” he said, then licked his lip. “I—”

“Shall I kill him?” someone offered. Careless, bored. Like the choice didn't matter.

If Tommy and Lovett had thought this far, Jon imagined, they might want some words with him.

“Hmm,” said a new voice, and then there was a finger under Jon's chin. Jon let his face be tilted up, slowly, and met the Chief Guard's eyes. They were as pale as the rest of him: pale and cold.

“What do you think?” he said, amused. “Would you like to die?”

“Please,” Jon said again. The tremble in his voice was real, and that pleased the Chief Guard. The rest of the man's mind was a slick, slippery thing, hard to get a grip on. “I don't, I can't—” Jon swallowed, and watched those pale eyes flick to his throat. “Please, I'm sorry—”

That was what did it. “No,” the Chief Guard said thoughtfully. “I think I'd like to make you beg.”

———

The Chief Guard had a dog in his quarters. Jon stared at it disbelievingly while the door clicked shut.

“You’ve never seen one before,” said the Chief Guard, patronizing. “Of course.”

It was a small, gold-furred thing, stretched up with its forepaws on the windowsill. It let out a forlorn noise when the windows turned opaque, and only then turned to look at the two of them. Its ears drooped; its tail drooped. Jon didn’t need to know anything about dogs for the _wrongness_ to strike him.

“You can pet it,” said the Chief Guard. “It doesn’t bite.”

The dog whined when Jon knelt and reached for it, but let him bury his fingers into its fur. Its coat was silky and soft, and the dog’s flanks quivered under his touch. How much had Lovett said a dog cost? Three million credits? Four? Surely not enough for this, which was licking his hand. Its presence felt like a miracle. Jon couldn’t understand it.

“It—” he started, “do you— it wants to go outside.”

“ _It_ wants?” The Chief Guard laughed. “Don’t be stupid.”

And that was what the Empire was. It didn’t care what anyone else wanted. It spread and spread, and grew arrogant on its power. _It doesn’t bite_ , he’d said. Probably, that’s what he thought of Jon, too.

“Please,” he said, letting the dog wriggle off his lap, and got to his feet. “If you could just let me go—”

“All in due time.” The Chief Guard was smiling as he drew closer. He’d done this before. He was expecting Jon to be afraid. Jon _was_ afraid.

“Don’t,” Jon said again, before the man kissed him.

The codes, the codes! What did a man like this feel when he moved the sky with a twitch of his fingers? Smug satisfaction lay over everything in his memory, thick and choking. He’d ordered the destruction of a planet without blinking. He saw whole star systems merely as pieces on a chessboard.

There was a hand cupping the back of Jon’s neck, teeth pressed into his upper lip, and all Jon could feel was smooth, calm certainty. How did you beat a man like this? How did you beat an _empire_ like this?

There was a dull vibration beneath Jon’s feet, a flutter in his throat. His skin was burning under the man’s touch.

“You know,” the Chief Guard whispered into his mouth. “It really is a shame what I’m going to have to do to you.”

And then, on the other side of Jon, the darkened window shuddered, shook — and blew up.

“What on—” One of the ships was moving on the airfield — a transporter, huge, listing crazily to one side. The left wing had been shot through with lasers, but it was still climbing up, against all odds, inch by inch—

Another rumble rolled through the floor, and suddenly Jon could taste fear that wasn’t his.

The Empire didn’t tolerate failure; an incident like this could end a man’s life. The Chief Guard had survived through the ranks, but there had been moments when he’d been deathly afraid, alone, frantically trying to make up for a mistake—

Jon’s head felt like it was splitting in two, but there, that was the man at a console, entering a code sequence with panicked fingers, and there, that was the fleet, moving precisely as ordered, and—

“The Emperor,” the Chief Guard was spitting, red-faced, “he’ll kill you, he’ll _kill_ —” And then the man howled, a small golden ball latched to his ankle, and Jon had to go, that was Tommy and Lovett out there, but he couldn’t—

The dog yelped, flung to the ground. Jon scooped its warm body into his arms and sprang for the window.

———

It was Lovett who’d been driving the transport ship.

“Don’t let him drive them anymore,” said Jon, watching Lovett enter the last security code into Tommy’s tangled calculations. “You know how hard you have to work to lose a wing on a _transport ship_?”

“Excuse me,” Lovett said, “did I not save your life? I distinctly remember a whole lot of heroics, all of which were due to me, the pilot, and not Tommy, the passenger—”

“Hey, look,” Tommy said, ignoring him completely. “That’s the flare, right on time.”

The Emperor could howl for his fleet all he wanted. Jon wished him luck recovering them from the heart of the sun.

Something cold prickled at the back of Jon’s neck. He raised a hand there and found something sharp coming away in his palm.

“That’s a _nanostructure_ ,” Lovett said, coming to peer into Jon’s hand. “It’s a— sting? The bees _stung_ you with telepathy?”

“They weren’t bees,” Jon said, but the ache in his head was finally fading. The bees had given him this. And— he looked at the sun, burning hot and steady— maybe he _had_ given them something, too.

“Hey,” said Tommy, suddenly quiet. “Listen, when you were— did they hurt you? Did they touch you?”

Jon looked at Tommy. Maybe Tommy never would stop worrying about Jon. But that was— well, Jon was okay with that. That was what Tommy did. And what Jon could do was to kiss him.

He couldn’t read Tommy’s mind anymore, but he didn’t need it anyway.

When Jon pulled away, Tommy had gone a shocking pink, all the way down his neck. “What— was that, uh— an _answer_?”

“It was a question,” Jon said firmly, and then turned around to pull Lovett in, too, pressed his mouth to Lovett’s for a long, slow moment. “You know, the sunsets here are spectacular.”

Tommy and Lovett glanced at each other; glanced back at Jon, mouths twitching. “Is that like, a proposal in Alpha-6?” said Lovett. “You’re back one day and you go all native.”

“It could be,” Jon laughed. “Just. Come home with me. I’ll show you the skies.”

“You’re a romantic,” Tommy said softly. “What about the dog?”

The dog was sprawled out by their feet, tail thumping slowly. Tommy crouched down, stroked a hand down its belly, and smiled when the dog’s legs started to wriggle. “He coming with us, too?”

“A dog, for all of Alpha Leonis,” Lovett said, and he was smiling too. “Okay. Not a bad deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> content notes: (implied) threatened rape and light forced sexual contact against jon in the course of a honeypot-type maneuver.


End file.
